Torchwood: Fanfic: No leg to stand on

[m_findlow]

Title: No leg to stand on
Fandom: Torchwood
Characters: Ianto, Jack, Owen
Author: m_findlow
Rating: PG
Length: 1,887 words
Content notes: none
Author notes: Written for badly_knitted's prompt "any, any, boneless" at fic_promptly
Summary: Relaxing like this wasn't on Ianto's agenda

If it was terribly upsetting for him, he had no idea how the others must have felt, since they were the ones that could actually see what had happened to him.

He honestly hadn't meant to get that close to it. They all knew better than to tempt fate with alien technology these days, but that didn't mean that accidents didn't happen. All the time.

He felt odd at first, but nothing happened, so he figured that the device hadn't actually done any harm at all. Well, that's a relief. Then he felt a bit shaky and wobbly, like he couldn't hold himself up anymore. The next thing he knew, he was on the ground in a heap, with the others rushing over to him to see what had happened.

There was a tingling sensation inside his body. It seemed like there wasn't a single part of him that wasn't affected. He felt like he was full of soda, bubbling and fizzing. Then he saw his arm. It was going all limp and deflated inside his shirt sleeve, like a balloon with all the air escaping out of it. He felt the rest of his body going the same way, shrinking down and flattening. He tried to wave his other arm in panic but found that there was nothing in it he could control. It was like the bones had completely disappeared, leaving behind nothing but floppy skin and surrounding muscles, now useless without the bones around them to give them something to do.

After that it got worse. He felt his torso sag, still holding a little bit of shape thanks to all the vital organs, which thankfully still seemed to be in working order. The worst part though was when he felt the tingling move into his face and he knew what was going to happen now. The sheer horror of it descended on him as his entire skull began to fizz and dissolve, his face sagging in on itself, eyes pointed in odd directions as the sockets simply ceased to exist, his nose sinking in and his mouth and cheeks flattening out and coming to rest against the skin on the back of his head. He was glad he couldn't see it, he was horrified enough to be experiencing it. And the shocked looks from the faces of his teammates told him more than he wanted to know. At least, the teammates he could see, now that his eyes had very little ability to move from their current positions. The fizzing sensation finally abated and he could feel that his body was nothing more than a flat, sagging pile of jelly, lying there uselessly on the ground.

He tried to speak, but found that he couldn't enunciate the words without a jaw, meaning what came out was just a garbled sound.

'Just relax, Ianto,' said Jack, who looked anything but. He wished he could have told Jack that considering his current state, he probably couldn’t be any more relaxed if he tried. He tried to focus on listening to the team, but even that was a blur, without the tiny bones in his ears to properly reverberate the sound. He did however make out the sound of Gwen being sick in the corner of the room. That wasn't good. He tried to imagine how he must look to have caused such a reaction, then stopped. He didn't want to be sick himself. Chances were he'd probably choke himself.

He tried to stay positive, hanging on to the thoughts that they'd be able to fix whatever had happened to him, but the more he saw the expressions on their faces, the more that little spark of hope died inside him. He could still think clearly even if everything else was a right mess, but he had no way of telling them that.

He could feel Owen lifting up one of his floppy arms and examining it closely. He had managed to bring it within Ianto's line of sight and seeing the end of his hand, hanging there uselessly like a rubber dish washing glove, upset him more than he expected. Tears began forming in his eyes, but without any shape to his face, they just sat there and pooled around the concave shape of his deflated face, blurring his vision and upsetting him even more.

Once Owen had decided there was no further damage to be done by moving him, they took him straight back to the hub. Jack tried oh so carefully to pick up his floppy body and cradle his head, but it was harder than he thought, trying to keep hold of something that he could barely get a grip on, and that had no distinct shape for him to work with. In the end, he resolved that he was going to have to do the unthinkable to carry him back to the SUV. He folded Ianto's arms and legs up and over his torso, compacting the amount of body he had to carry. It felt weird being folded up like a tent or a knitted jumper. He and Jack had shared jokes about Ianto's amazing flexibility, but this was not at all funny. When Jack finally managed to pick him up, holding his head upright, he finally saw for the first time what everyone else had seen. It was bad.

He spent the entire trip back to the hub draped over the front passenger seat like a car seat cover, carefully strapped into place, thinking about what would happen if they couldn't fix him. Would Owen be able to build and surgically insert new bones to replace the ones he'd lost? People got hip replacements all the time didn't they? Could they rebuild his body with metal parts? He wasn't sure if he wanted that, being half robot. It would still be his muscles controlling the show, but how would he feel? Maybe this was how Lisa had felt. He suddenly felt ashamed at having tried to preserve her life. He didn't want to be a half metal, half human thing, even if it wasn't the same as having your consciousness completely erased by a metal monster. But he didn't want to lie in a hospital bed for the rest of his life, completely helpless either. Better they kill him.

He wanted desperately to tell Jack that if he couldn't be fixed back to how he'd been, he didn't want to be fixed at all. All he could manage was some indistinguishable groans and gargles, and Jack reaching out to grasp his saggy hand and tell him everything was going to be okay.

Back at the hub, he was laid out on Owen's medical table and the device carefully placed nearby. Jack had given strict instructions that they were all to stay well away from the device until he could figure out what had happened, and that if he started to go the same way, bones melting and all, they should kill him. At least that's what Ianto thought he heard, it was all still a bit indecipherable, but it made sense. Jack could at least reset his body back to normal via death, unpleasant as it was. And Owen was would make sure it was as painless as possible.

Fortunately that wasn't required, but it did take him several hours of tinkering with it to finally understand what it did and how to fix it. It was the smile on Jack's face that told him he'd figured it out. Maybe he'd be okay after all. He tried to smile back, but Jack laughed at the expression that ended up on his face in the attempt, kissing him regardless of how ugly he must have looked.

Jack spent some time giving instructions to Owen, who spent the next two hours injecting Ianto full of various solutions and struggling mightily to find a vein without accidentally puncturing something else in the process. Normal human anatomy no longer applied and it had their medical expert suitably challenged. He watched as bag after bag of liquid was pumped into him. As if he didn't feel like the human version of a hot water bottle already.

When Jack was satisfied that Owen had done all of the necessary preparations, he activated the device and Ianto held his breath, waiting for something to happen.

At first there was nothing, and he felt despair that it hadn't worked. Then there was that tingling sensation again, a bit like pins and needles all over. Something was happening, he just wasn't sure what. Slowly, he began to feel a firmness returning to his body, most noticeably in his face as his eyes lolled about in different directions once more, gliding upwards and outwards, back to where they were supposed to be. He felt his jawbone returning, teeth growing back and his nose shuffling back into its correct position on his face. He felt his body beginning to straighten out as his spine formed back into place, arms, legs, ribcage and hips, all reforming. Last but not least he felt sensation restoring to his hands, able to twitch them slightly as all the tiny bones knitted themselves back together. It was altogether bizarre and a relief at the same time, his body reinflating itself back to he correct shape.

'Great job, Owen,' he heard Jack say, clearly and definitively.

He decided to test out his restored body, impatient to know that he was back to normal again, moving his arm outwards to reach for Jack. Jack grabbed for his hand and clasped it. Ianto gripped it tightly with his regenerated fingers. How good were fingers, he thought. He was never taking them for granted ever again.

'Hey, how are you feeling?'

He stretched his jaw a little before attempting to speak. It seemed a weird feeling having all this stuff back around his mouth and tongue.

'What did you do?' Good, at least he hadn't forgotten how to talk, hearing his own voice make perfect sense, and not just the one inside his head.

'The device is designed to remove certain dangerous chemicals from objects without having to open them, like taking all of the dangerous radium and isotopes out of a nuclear reactor,' Jack explained. 'It must have been set on calcium when it activated, disintegrating all of your bones. But the good news is that it's capable of putting stuff back in as well, so long as it knows the correct setting and configuration. Unfortunately, it had already disposed of the calcium it took from your body, so we had to replace the calcium in your body manually, so the machine had enough material to regrow your bones. We also had to upload your medical records into the machine so that it had a full scan of your body and your skeletal system so as to be able to reconstitute it. You were very lucky. If the machine had been set to oxygen, it would have killed you.'

'Bloody Torchwood,' Ianto groaned, not wanting to consider the possibility of his near demise.

'I'd give it a few more hours, just to make sure all the bones are fully repaired, but you should make a full recovery.'

'Thanks, Jack.' He knew it seemed inadequate, but Jack knew what he meant.

Comments

[bk_forever]

Well, that was... disturbing O.O

Poor boneless Ianto, I was worried that moving him might damage his delicate insides, but I'm so gl;ad they could re-grow his skeleton again. He would not have looked pretty, all melty like that, I was so sad for him!

Thanks for the fill... I think ;)